Journal of International Studies

A mixture of oil, diesel fuel, water and mud sprays as roughnecks wrestle pipe on a True Company oil drilling rig outside Watford, North Dakota, October 20, 2012. Picture taken October 20, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart America has moved from oil scarcity to oil abundance, and our attitudes need to change in order to keep up. If the  stream  of headlines  and panels is any indication, you’d have to be an idiot to disagree with that claim. So call me stupid, because I just don’t see it. There’s no question that U.S. oil production is booming. The country  has passed  Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest liquid fuels producer and is  now producing  more oil than it imports. The rise in U.S. output, which is poised to continue, is  good news  for the economy and national security. It’s also something that leaders need to adjust to as they develop policy and strategy. But setting production records and passing milestones is fundamentally diff...

Brazil, Argentina and other countries across the Americas are seeking to ramp up fossil-fuel production. So much for curbing carbon emissions.

Meet America's Unlikeliest Gas Mogul By  Gregory Zuckerman NOVEMBER 8, 2013 A long-haul truck with LNG tank.  (TruckPR / Flickr) It was 2002, and the race to find natural gas in the United States was on. Oilmen and businessmen were making massive bets on overlooked U.S. fields. Charif Souki was just as sure the United States needed new energy supplies. And he was certain he had a way to get his hands on enough natural gas to change his country’s fortunes, as well as his own. Souki was a rank outsider to the oil patch. He hadn’t taken a single geology or engineering course -- or even worked a day in an oil or gas field. He had no business imagining himself as any kind of energy player. But Souki had an audacious plan. BIG MAN ON CAMPUS Souki was born in Cairo in 1953, a year after a coup d’état led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. His father, Samyr, a Greek Orthodox Christian, moved the family to Beirut when Charif was four, after Samyr realiz...

China is hoping to increase the volume of oil it purchases from Iraq by some 70 percent in 2014,  Reuters  reports . Speaking at the World Energy Congress in South Korea on Wednesday, Hussain Al-Shahristani, Iraq’s deputy prime minister for energy, said that China has told Iraq that it hopes to purchase at least 850,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Baghdad next year, up more than two-thirds from the 500,000 bpd of crude it is importing from Iraq this year. This would put Iraq up there with China’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia. Last year China imported around 1.1 million bpd from Saudi Arabia, which accounted for roughly 20 percent of Beijing’s total oil imports. Altogether, China imported about 2.9 million bpd of oil from the Middle East in 2011, or 60 percent of its total oil imports. As the increase in imports from Iraq suggests, China’s heavy reliance on Middle Eastern oil isn’t likely to change significantly for the foreseeable future, despite C...

Forty years after the Arab oil embargo, new technologies are dramatically reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East. BY AMY MYERS JAFFE, ED MORSE Forty years have passed since the Arab oil embargo went into effect on Oct. 16, 1973, triggering a period of incredible change and turmoil. After the United States provided support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a cartel of developing-world countries (via the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC) banned the sale of their oil to Israel's allies and thereby set in motion geopolitical circumstances that eventually allowed them to wrest control over global oil production and pricing from the giant international oil companies -- ushering in an era of significantly higher oil prices. The event was hailed at the time as the first major victory of "Third World" powers to bring the West to its knees. Designed in part to bring Arab populations their due after decades of colonialism, the embargo open...

What We Got Wrong About OPEC's Oil Embargo A worker turns a valve to release drilled oil near the Dead Sea, October 9, 2006.  (Eliana Aponte / Courtesy Reuters) T he first U.S. energy secretary, James Schlesinger, observed in 1977 that when it comes to energy, the United States has “only two modes -- complacency and panic.” Today, with the country in the middle of an oil and gas boom that could one day crown it the world’s largest oil producer, the pendulum has swung toward complacency. But 40 years ago this week, panic ruled the day, as petroleum prices quadrupled in a matter of months and Americans endured a traumatic gasoline shortage, waiting for hours in long lines only to be greeted by signs reading “Sorry, no gas.” The cause of these ills, Americans explained to themselves, was the Arab oil embargo -- the decision by Iran and the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut off oil exports to the United States and its allies as puni...